My lap top has kicked the bucket , lights are on but no one is home ,,,,,,,,is there some way/thing I can use to get the info off the hard drive ? take it out and weld it to something

Rob

Hi Rob,

For not very much you can buy an enclosure to put your hard drive in and then connect it to a desktop (or other laptop) via USB. You can get PATA and SATA versions so you need to take out the hard drive and Google the part number to find out which type it is.

I have three with varying sizes of hard drive which I use for external backup devices.

Photos of the lathe would be nice - thanks. My first lathe was a Hobbymat (as was my second because the first was rubbish - the dovetail on the saddle had a 0.5mm step half way along! CZ came to my house to bring me a new one and take the offending one away.) The worst thing about it was the 1mm pitch leadscrew which got a bit tedious if you had any distance to travel.

On your photo, just above/left of the CE is a "Serial ATA" logo - so its a SATA drive and you want to look for a SATA enclosure or adapter.

If the drive itself is dead, I don't know if its worth much effort to get the platter out of these modern drives - unlike some of the older machines where you could get a great disc of aluminium (either get rid of the magnetic coating to use the metal disc, or just varnish it). Back in the late 70s or early 80s our operators' rest area in the Computer Lab had a coffee table, maybe 25" or 28" in diameter made from an old disc platter. In those days, indication of a disc crash was red dust on the exhaust filter!

There *are* pretty cheap adaptors on eBay that do SATA and IDE both, to USB - as the computer geek that gets lumbered - oops, asked nicely to sort everyone's PC's, they're really handy to have, along with an external drive to save what I can recover - but an enclosure is good if you have another pc you can plug into.

Oooh, snap, I've got one of those sitting on my desk, the only difference is mine is a 160GB. It too is dead.

One thing you could try is, pick the disk up by the long sides, 4 fingers on one side, thumb on the other; and then rotate it back & forth rapidly (in the plane the disk would spin) a couple of times. Then try booting again.

Sometimes, these drives suffer stiction, and just need a quick jolt to free them up. I had that problem this very weekend with my laptop.

Logged

Cheers!Ade.--Location: Wallasey, Merseyside. A long way from anywhere.Or: Zhengzhou, China. An even longer way from anywhere...Skype: adev73

You can run Puppy linux in a laptop with a dead drive. Many people do that as their main OS for years without even bothering to replace the hard drive.

They boot off the Puppy Linux CD and use a thumb drive for data storage, or even move the Linux OS to the thumb drive as well and boot from that (if the laptop BIOS allows booting from USB.)

If the hard drive is readable, but the boot or Windows OS is messed up on it, you can just continue using the data from the HD as if it was a normal drive under Puppy Linux. It doesn't care about the old OS.

In fact it, and the application programs bundled with it, run in RAM, so once it is up and loaded, you can remove ALL disks, and still be running the OS and your programs. This also makes it lightning fast compared to XP in an older computer.

The entire OS, including word processor, spreadsheet, photo editor, browser, movie player, and about 50 other programs all loaded as a bundle of only about 100 megabytes total in size, so they fit in just about any modern memory size.

Rob.Wilson

I THINK ,,,,,,,, my laptop is RIP ,TOAST , wile waiting for my hard drive box to come , should have been here today ,I tied another hard drive in the laptop ,,,,,,ZIP,FOOK ALL ,,,,,,,,not even the Toshiba boot option screen thing came up ,BUGGER

So Its about time I got a new computer , Desktop ,,,,,,,,,,,,But I dont like the look of Windows 8 , anyone out there using it?

Dont know about 8 but 7 has been in my opinion the best. it took me a little while to fathom it but now i like it.

don't go desk-top because in my opinion they are limited just to the table, i do allot of auctions and i keep all my research on my lap top it goes everywhere with me.

don't buy the latest go for an older model mine is three years old its a I3 CPU 2.40GHZ win 7 Home premium and works like a dream, i do all what you want to do, i chose the widest screen i could get, i have never regretted that at all.

Rob before you bin it try taking the battery out, wait 10 mins and power on again just on the supply (no battery). If you don not get power straight away, hold the power button for up to 15-20s. If it lights up your problem is the battery :-) if not then you know its toast.

This is a problem for machines that get left on the power supply all the time without draining the bat. Worth a try so at least you will know.